January 28, 2007

PR PR: Here Come the Charisma Reviews

Maybe a hopeful title, yeah, but this one by Gerald Howard is a loooooooooong and well-done introduction to P.R., by way of next month's forthcoming Charisma (Pantheon), at Bookforum. It also sports the best picture of Rieff I've seen in a while. Alas it ends on this note:

After
these months of going to school on his collected works, I wished I
could sit down with Professor Rieff and have a long student-teacher
conference, for I had many questions to ask him and some bones to pick.
The contradictions in his own position can be puzzling, bordering on
infuriating. How could he have spent all those decades in the sociology
department when his work is pristinely innocent of actual social
observation? Why did he allow several ugly instances of homophobia to
mar his work? Was he himself ever psychoanalyzed, and if so, how did
that work for him? Why, with only a couple of minor exceptions, does he
let Freud off the hook for creating the conditions for the therapeutic
culture he despises? How did he reconcile his fierce and eloquent
defense of faith as the force that gives human life order and meaning
with his own apparent faithlessness and a personal life devoid of
religious observance? How could he have been without faith himself and
yet have such faith in faith? So nu? I wanted to
have a man-to-man talk about this. I once had faith, but my immersion
in the modern secular and scientific culture had its usual effect, and
now it's as lost as my altar boy's cassock and surplice. The more I
found myself convinced by Rieff's polemics on behalf of the sacred
order, the more impossible the dilemma of the modern intellectual
appeared. I yearned for whatever it was that Flannery O'Connor had: At
a dinner party where Mary McCarthy was cooing about the "beautiful
symbolism" of the Eucharist, O'Connor famously retorted, "Well, if it's
a symbol, to hell with it." Where does that conviction come from?

Some
of these questions ought to have been answered for someone who's read
Rieff and understood him. I'm not speaking esoterica here. The "ugly
instances of homophobia," for example, are phrased, it seems to me, as
descriptions of socio-ethical disapproval of the homosexual act. That
whether or not one agrees with
the outcome of this intellectual process seems to make it homophobic or
not would seem to qualify the seriousness of that epithet as a
descriptive category itself. Given a certain reading of the structure
of social order at its most fundamental, it's pretty noncontroversial
that homosexuality is a perpetual challenge or affront to that order. I
think a lot of people in Queer Studies have absolutely no problem with
that analysis -- they only come out on the other end at the conclusion
stage, opposed to what Rieff is not for the very reason Howard senses.
But even on a Rieffist sociological model one has to understand
homosexuality, like many other social phenomena, as operating within a
perpetually working, perpetually contested cultural authority of
interdicts (that which is not to be done) and remissions (that which is
not to be done but for which exceptions are occasionally 'granted'
anyway). One need not either scorn nor embrace. Thank God that is true
about almost everything. Life would hardly be worth the effort. By
relieving degrees, we have the profound sovereign freedom to ignore one another.

So there's one example. As for the symbolism question, Deathworks was
originally dedicated to the memory of the second commandment. But bravo
on issuing this review, Mr. Howard. And stay tuned, sports fans. And
please Google "Philip Rieff" within this site, in the search bar down
and below on the right, to read more, while I tag my archived hundreds
of posts for categories.